


small dot among infinite stars

by kindclaws



Series: bingo, chopped, and prompts [6]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Disassociation, F/M, Protectiveness, pine cone metaphors galore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-10 16:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20854712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: Dante is painting in his office when they enter, his movements carrying the gentle tremble of old age. Doesn't even look up when the door shuts behind them, just sayshelloin that wispy, scratchy old man voice and keeps staring at his canvas."We've got some bad news," Clarke says, steeling herself."Youarebad news," Dante says. Underneath the agreeable tone there is something bitter and curdling. Dante may have pulled the trigger that stopped Cage Wallace, but Clarke isn't surprised that he blames them for it."The world is ending again," Bellamy says."Unfortunate that it likes to do that," Dante says. When he keeps painting, Clarke fantasizes about taking the paintbrush and stabbing him with it.- or, Dante Wallace shoots his son. Clarke doesn't irradiate Mount Weather. Months later, ALIE warns her a nuclear winter is coming, and suddenly, that act of mercy means everything.





	small dot among infinite stars

**Author's Note:**

> **CONTENT WARNINGS:** allusions to substance abuse, implied needles, a lot of guilt and self-hatred
> 
> This fic was written for the Canon Divergent round of The 100 Chopped Challenge. These 4 prompts had to be included:  
1\. Someone lives/someone dies that didn't in canon  
2\. Protectiveness  
3\. Sunsets  
4\. A dichotomy, a conflict.
> 
> You can find out more [at this link](https://chopped100challenge.tumblr.com/).
> 
> **PERMISSIONS:** Please do not download and save this fic locally. I make frequent revisions and don't like the idea of old versions being out there, and if I ever decide I hate it, I'll orphan it rather than delete it so you'll still be able to find and read it! I'm open to translations and podfics, but please contact me on tumblr first. Do not upload to other sites. Do not claim as your own.

After ALIE tells Clarke she has scant weeks to find a way to survive another apocalypse, her mind goes searching for a way out. Even as Abby dabs at the dried black blood under her nose and fusses over her injuries, Clarke feels distant, the smiles she forces feeling like a stiff porcelain mask over her real fear. She has the urge to move. One foot in front of the other. But there's nowhere to flee on the surface of the planet where the nuclear winter won't reach. ALIE was very clear about that.

_Surface of the planet_, she thinks, dread pooling low in her gut. The battle against ALIE's brainwashed minions has taken too much out of them. Abby says no one is ready to move or do much that day. Clarke thinks that if she walked out of Polis' gates with her head held high that enough people would join her to cause trouble, but she allows her mother to feel like she's in charge again. Bellamy is exhausted, after all, and she knows nothing she could say would stop him from staggering into danger after her.

So they find an unclaimed bedroom in the tower where Clarke was half-princess, half-prisoner just a few weeks ago. It feels like a long time away. The dropship days, too, feel like a distant dream. She aches for them.

Bellamy sits down on the bed but keeps his back upright against the rusted headboard and his rifle in his lap. Clarke convinces him to take off his boots, and then proceeds to not follow her own advice so she can pace endlessly in the confines of their little room. Staying still for even a second feels like agony. She needs to be doing something. She can hear a clock ticking in the distance, real or imagined. A countdown. A threat she cannot threaten back. Grains of sand tumbling from the top of an hourglass, burying her. Clarke had the same sensation of dread in solitary, waiting to turn eighteen and be floated as quickly and quietly as possible. Except that then she just wanted to sleep and draw in the silence of her cell, willing the time to pass faster if only so she had to suffer less boredom. Now she wants to clutch at every second and demand that it lingers. Now she wants that time she feels is being stolen, and the prospect of lying down to pretend to sleep feels like the worst thing she's ever had to do for someone else.

"Clarke," Bellamy says eventually. She turns on her heel. He hasn't moved. One finger drums idly against the barrel of his rifle, but she doesn't think he notices. He looks so calm on the outside. Is he screaming on the inside, like she is?

"We're going to die," she tells him. It sounds clinical. It doesn't feel that way yet.

"Not yet," Bellamy says. He touches the soft fur laid out on the mattress beside him. "Clarke. We can deal with it tomorrow. Rest now."

She takes off her boots and lays down next to him, pleased when he shuffles down so he's horizontal too. The rifle is still in his arms, the end of the barrel pointing at the door, away from her.

"That thing loaded?" Clarke asks the darkness.

"What answer would make you feel better?" Bellamy asks dryly. A beat. "It's not going to go off in the middle of the night. I know what I'm doing."

"I don't," Clarke says, and immediately bursts into tears. She doesn't see Bellamy set down the rifle but seconds later he's rolling over to face her, one of his legs bumping against her knees, soft soothing noises scraping in his throat as he touches the wet tracks on the side of her face. Clarke hates crying on her back, hates the tears running into her ears and going cold with the draft coming in through the shattered windows. But she won't move with Bellamy so close. She wants him closer.

"Hey, hey," Bellamy says, brushing his thumb against her jaw. Clarke tilts her head up.

"Kiss me," she begs, and he hesitates, but he does it. Clarke manages to kill a surprising amount of time that way, with his thigh wedged between hers and the strangled groans in his throat as she runs her tongue against his teeth and yanks at his hair sharply enough to hurt. But thinking about the way his moans sound makes her remember that he really was strangled today and has a necklace of purple bruises to prove it, and that kills the ache that was building between her legs. She breaks off from kissing him and just pulls him closer, not caring about the weight on her ribcage, just wanting his forehead against her pillow and her nose brushing against his neck. He understands without her needing to say a word. They hug for a while and Clarke fantasizes about dying in his arms.

"The surface of the Earth will be unsurvivable," Clarke murmurs to the crook of his neck. Bellamy stirs just far enough to see her face. He's smarter than her mother or anyone on Alpha Station ever gave him credit for. He knows what she's thinking.

"So we're headed to Mount Weather tomorrow?" he asks lowly.

"Are you coming?" Clarke asks, her voice suddenly small and unsure. Bellamy touches her cheek.

"Of course."

She breathes out. _Of course._

"How many people do you think that bunker could fit?" she asks.

Bellamy scratches at his nose.

"There were 430, including the 48. Maybe 100 Grounders in cages. We'll say... no more than 600, total population," he says flatly. No comment on how many of those people would be theirs.

"I think we could push that number up," Clarke says. "The hydroponics are designed to last forever, but we wouldn't need forever. Just a few years."

"Hard sell," Bellamy says.

They're talking around the obvious problem.

"Dante won't be happy to see us," Clarke says.

"He owes us," Bellamy says, his voice as hard as a stone. As a cold vacuum. As the end of the world on the horizon again.

"He doesn't think so," Clarke says, and somehow, they lapse into sleep, limbs tangled together, the rifle somewhere nearby.

The relationship between the Arkadian survivors and Mount Weather can be best described as a mutual hostage situation. No one's pleased with it, but they've held a tentative peace since Clarke asked Dante to find a way forward that didn't involve them all dying, and Dante responded by shooting his son in the head.

See, Lexa's coalition was never going to fully accept the people who fell out of the sky, nor would they ever forgive the den of vampires who preyed on them for decades. An enemy of an enemy is a friend. An enemy of a reluctant, resentful ally becomes another reluctant, resentful ally. If not examined too closely, the compromise passes for peace.

The price of getting the twelve armies to back down was agreeing not to capture any more bloodbags. The price of getting the existing prisoners out of Mount Weather was for the Sky People to agree to become replacement blood donors. Raven's bombs disabled the acid fog system and destroyed all but one of the turbines, leaving Mount Weather comparatively defenceless. It was a power vacuum that the Sky People were happy enough to fill. They began to rebuild Arkadia on top of Mount Weather, providing protection and the dangling carrot of future bone marrow transplants, in exchange for food from Mount Weather's hydroponic farms until the Sky People's crops began to take root and territory no sane Grounder would go near. And somehow, they'd settled into a truce.

A very, very fragile truce, with Clarke at the center.

She and Bellamy get a lot of questions about what had happened in the room where Dante shot his own son to save the rest of his people. The Council, still clawing for power even now on the ground, is still angry for Clarke for not telling them how she first convinced Dante to cooperate. She can't tell them she appealed to a shared humanity the Ark had thrown out an airlock in bits and pieces over 97 years. Some days she really wants to.

When it gets bad she bites her tongue, literally, and meets Bellamy's eyes from across the table. The burning fury hiding in his dark eyes and the clench of his jaw is always, for some reason, soothing. He is fire and she is ice and alone they'd destroy themselves, but together, they just might survive.

The months of tense co-existence and back and forth negotiation have streamlined the decontamination process for a Sky Person entering Mount Weather, but being fully cleared for entry still takes a few hours on a good day. Clarke itches through it. She wishes, at least, that she and Bellamy weren't separated for decontamination. She doesn't know exactly how it works but to her there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't be locked in quarantine together.

She lies on the cot provided and thinks about the way he'd kissed her last night. She stays very still even when she starts feeling warm. It'd be nice to indulge in that memory, but there's a camera in the corner, a spot of darkness against an otherwise perfect backdrop of white.

Quarantine takes too much time. They're all going to die and instead of sitting up on the surface smelling the flowers that will never germinate again she's staring at a ceiling trying to decide if she wants the hours to go by faster or slow down after all.

Finally they let her out and Bellamy is on the other side, dressed in loose white clothes that do very little to hide the hard planes of his body. He still looks like a weapon, even without his jacket and the rifle he loves so much. If Clarke has understood the story he told her haltingly, reluctantly, then he killed someone in Mount Weather with his bare hands wearing nothing but underwear. There's nothing that the people of Mount Weather could do to stop him if he made a promise to follow through on something for her. What keeps them safest is not the layers of lead insulating them from the outside radiation or the confiscation of their weapons and armour. No. It's Bellamy's remorse.

Some days Clarke wakes up and feels remorse. Some days she has to look at Bellamy's face to remind herself.

Dante is painting in his office when they enter, his movements carrying the gentle tremble of old age. The shake becomes significantly less pronounced the closer his paintbrush gets to the canvas, like the concentration is enough to pause the slow breaking of his body. He's so fucking slow. Doesn't even look up when the door shuts behind them, just says _hello_ in that wispy, scratchy old man voice and keeps staring at his canvas. Clarke knows it's a power move but it still gets to her. She stares hard at the papery skin of the hand holding the paintbrush and wonders how good the ventilation system can possibly be. Shouldn't the paint fumes have killed him by now? He was willing to let her paint with him, the first time she was trapped inside the bunker. Maybe he'd make that offer again.

"We've got some bad news," Clarke says, steeling herself.

"You _are_ bad news," Dante says. Underneath the agreeable tone there is something bitter and curdling. Dante may have pulled the trigger that stopped Cage Wallace, but Clarke isn't surprised that he blames them for it.

"The world is ending again," Bellamy says.

"Unfortunate that it likes to do that," Dante says. When he keeps painting, Clarke fantasizes about taking the paintbrush and stabbing him with it. She swallows that down with the rest of the terrifying new facts she's learning about herself and forces out an explanation of ALIE's warning, of the time ticking on all their lives.

Dante finally puts the paintbrush down.

"What do you want, Clarke?"

"Space inside Mount Weather for my people," she says, though they both know that was what she was building towards. It hurts to admit it.

It hurts even more when Dante starts laughing his hoarse old man laugh.

"You tried so hard to get _out_ of my bunker," he says, every syllable cutting into her. "You were willing to kill so many to get back to the surface. And now you want back in, begging for shelter from the very radiation you refused to save us from."

"Without a healthy supply of blood, you'll die too," Bellamy warns lowly.

"Oh, I know," Dante says brightly. "Can we not take a moment, before we jump to logistics, just to admire the irony of this conversation? My, Clarke, how the mighty have fallen."

"We don't have time to waste admiring shit," Clarke says. "We both die without each other. Now how do we work together?"

"How many people do you have on the ground?" Dante asks. "Have you found any more stations?

"We have about 700," Bellamy says.

"They won't all fit," Dante says. "And even if they were, I'm reluctant to let mine be outnumbered. Tell me, Clarke, why are you asking nicely that I share my toys, and not marching in to take my home by force? Or, what's stopping you from killing all my people anyway once enough of yours are moved in?"

Clarke tastes the same ozone in the back of her throat she tasted when she saw Jake thrown from the airlock by the sudden depressurization. In the time it takes her to remember how to breathe through it, Bellamy has already taken a menacing step forward.

She grabs his hand.

"Trying to take the bunker by force from the outside is tactically unsound," Clarke forces herself to say. "We would have lost enough of the twelve armies if we tried. I'm not going to try it with my current numbers."

"And afterwards?" Dante asks politely. "What line of reasoning will keep my people alive?"

The man who showed her his kill marks stares up at her in disbelief, a hand clamped to his bleeding throat. The skulls burned in the ring of fire crunch under her weight. Finn's chin falling to his chest, Raven's hollow scream of grief, like a howl. The way Jasper still won't look at her for how close she came to irradiating everyone inside this goddamn prison.

"I want us to be the good guys," Clarke says in a very small voice. It's not the admission of a politician, just that of a teenage girl still trying to wash the blood off her hands.

Dante picks up the paintbrush again.

"I will allow 100 of your people to shelter within Mount Weather through the reckoning," Dante says, looking at the canvas. "And I will treat them like my own. You have my word on that. I have two stipulations. Jasper Jordan must be on that list."

"Done," Clarke says. He spends more time underground than he does in Arkadia already.

"And the second stipulation?" Bellamy asks with narrowed eyes.

"You two cannot be on that list."

The deal hits Clarke like a blow to the chest.

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

"I don't think that's okay," Bellamy hisses to her.

Clarke touches his jaw very gently.

"It's okay, Bellamy," she says, forcing a smile. "We're not lost yet."

Why does she feel both hollow and relieved at the same time?

"It should be mostly children," Kane says to the rest of the room, looking haggard and exhausted with the spectre of their deaths hanging over them. He has been saying some variation of this sentence for most of the hour they have all been packed into the council room, and Clarke is starting to get sick of it. The sentiment is noble enough, but the words are starting to lose meaning. She wants Kane out of the room. She wants everyone out of the room. She wants to lay her head down on the cold metal table they're seated at and have her father stroke her hair gently, but Jake Griffin has been dead for nearly a year and a half and for some goddamn reason it's Clarke's job to make sure the rest of the Ark doesn't follows suit.

"I don't think so," one of the Majors snaps. It's the one that replaced Major Byrne after the gorilla tore her arm off. Clarke never bothered to learn his name and she's not inclined now. What's important is that he's allied with Kara Cooper, who is here representing the engineering division since Jaha fucked off two days ago saying he'd look for another way to salvation - thanks, Jaha, but you've done enough, Clarke wanted to say - and Sinclair is buried up to his eyeballs in Raven's latest stroke of genius.

"The children - " Kane starts.

"Are easy prey, once they're out of sight," Kara insists. "Or do you really think the society of vampires that was perfectly okay with drilling into teenagers without anesthesia will treat prisoners better if they're younger?"

_You're right_, Clarke thinks distantly. _It's much more morally superior to wait until they're eighteen before you kill them._

It's not until everyone is staring at her that she realizes she's said that out loud. She bites her tongue and ignores them all except for Bellamy, who is the only one who doesn't look shamed by her comment. No, he looks like a firebrand she's just breathed oxygen to. The look in his eyes tells her that if she wants to stand up and flip the table in anger, he'll back her up. The realization makes her set her shoulders back and hold her head higher. It's tempting. It's so, very tempting. But she raises her hand ever so slightly off the table, fingers splayed, and watches his gaze flicker down to it. He sits back in his chair for the moment, the fire reigned in. 

"We should send in warriors," Kara says. "A force strong enough to protect the others if Mount Weather goes back on its word."

No one has to name the betrayal that Clarke is sure they're all suddenly remembering, but it still makes her flinch. 

"Those are valuable spots - "

"Why only 100?" someone else begins to shout. "They'll die without us. We should press the advantage - "

"We _deserve_ more than that."

"Shut up," Clarke mutters. No one listens. "Shut up," she says, a little louder, but Kara has already gotten to her feet, one fist coming down to slam on the table with a ringing echo that surprises Clarke and chases away some of the persistent fog that seems to hang over her mind. Clarke looks at Bellamy, and finds him already rolling his eyes. She suddenly thinks that she doesn't get to look at him often enough. They're usually standing side by side, facing some new danger head-on. She should look at him more, while they're still alive to do it. He had freckles when they first landed in the dropship, but months of hard sun have made them dark and populous. She's suddenly violently fond of his freckles, and wants to tell him so.

"This is bullshit. We deserve more than a hundred chances to live," Kara shouts, and Clarke tilts her head, distantly assessing, as she storms out of the room with the Major on her heels, the door to the cabin banging in their wake. They put so much work into building those cabins, assuming they would be homes for years to come, maybe generations if the Grounders calmed down and stopped demanding ritual sacrifice left and right. They were meant to be permanent structures, fit for winter, not like the shoddy constructions of the dropship days. Clarke is suddenly very sad that these cabins will never see the light of spring. 

Kane looks at Clarke. His eyes are very sad. She's reminded, suddenly, of how Dante had looked, old and tired and so very haunted as his son bled out on the floor. 

"You'll make the list?" he asks. 

_Why wouldn't it be me?_ Clarke thinks, and is grateful that this thought doesn't jump out of her mouth without permission. She nods jerkily, and is relieved when Kane sighs and looks away, the burden removed from his shoulders.

The Council disperses, everyone haggard and exhausted, dragging the spectres of their approaching deaths out the door with them. She has a sudden memory of the first rainfall, the skies turning purple and gray and opening up, drenching every delinquent's upturned face. She remembers seeing even Bellamy affected by it, his eyes wide, a sudden youthful delight lurking behind the set of his jaw. His face lowering from the sight of rain slowly, considering her. _Whatever the hell we want_, he said. Clarke knows him so well she can hear his voice in his head now and it makes her shiver nearly as well as the real thing would. She bumps her shoulder against Bellamy's when everyone else is out of earshot. 

"Hey," she says, and takes a deep breath. "We should have sex."

He stumbles a half-step and catches himself on the cabin wall. 

"I - " he says. "What?"

"I know you know what that is, Bellamy," Clarke says, stepping into his space, her toes deliberately edging into the gap between his feet. She can't help but smirk. "You had plenty of it at the dropship."

He flushes and looks away for a moment, dragging a hand over his mouth. 

"Can I ask what brought this on?" he says, sounding a little pained. 

"World's ending."

"Is that the only reason?"

"It's the best one," Clarke says, her smile fading at Bellamy's flat tone. "I'm sorry," she says. "I... misread."

"Clarke - " Bellamy says, one hand cutting sharply through the air in a frustrated motion. He exhales roughly, and begins walking away from her, his shoulders tense. Clarke's heart falls and she bites her tongue. Too late for that now. She should have shut herself up earlier, not ruined this. 

Bellamy spins back around on his heel and marches back towards her. 

"What - " Clarke asks, but then his hand closes in a vice grip around her forearm and tugs her forcefully into the cabin they just vacated. It's empty now except for the chairs strewn about in anger and the table in the center. Bellamy lifts her up without warning and dumps her on the edge, his knees nudging hers apart. The metal is freezing even through the fabric of her pants but she's warm wherever his body pulls flush with hers. Bellamy puts a finger under her chin and raises it until he's staring into her eyes, something hungry in his gaze. 

"You," he says, pronouncing each word very carefully. "Are the most _infuriating_ person I have ever met."

She starts taking her clothes off before he's finished asking. 

Later, Clarke's washing up in the stream when a shadow passes over her. She reaches for the knife holster strapped to her bare thigh, and only a moment later registers Harper's face and the carefree sound of conversation drifting on the wind from somewhere upstream. Luckily, Harper barely blinks. The dropship days instilled some hard instincts in them that not everyone who came down afterwards understands yet. 

But they will. 

"Hey," Harper says. "Been a while."

"Sorry," Clarke says. "The adults are demanding."

Harper smiles at that, at least. Then the smile fades as she looks down at her feet, kicking at stray pebbles along the riverbank. And Clarke suddenly understands that Harper has come to ask something. 

"There's a rumour going around that the Council is planning to take shelter in Mount Weather," Harper says carefully. "And that there won't be room for everyone."

Clarke swallows down a hard lump in her throat that tastes like iron.

"How are you going to pick people?"

"No one's decided," Clarke says at last.

"Oh..." Harper says. "I just, I guess, I just wanted to come by and maybe make the choice easier for you." She takes a very deep breath and rubs at the spot on her elbow where Clarke knows she still carries one of half a dozen scars from Dr Tsing's drills. They didn't heal well, even though Clarke and Abby did their very best. The skin is thick and ropy there, and it'll pull at her forever. "I don't want to go back into Mount Weather," Harper says, her voice clear and strong even when her eyes start to water at the corners. "Not ever again. If that means dying out here, on the ground... that'll be okay. It's like the traveller's blessing, right?"

_It's a horrible way to die_, Clarke thinks, and for a moment she considers telling Harper exactly how radioactive fallout goes about killing someone. But it's easier on both of them if she doesn't, so she just nods, feeling like someone's shoved a knife between her ribs. 

"Don't put me on the list," Harper says.

"Okay," Clarke says, her voice a whisper. Harper looks at her a moment. 

"I thought you'd be harder to convince," Harper says with a wavering laugh. She forces one of the bright, honest smiles she's so known and beloved for, and it slowly fades as Clarke says nothing. "I wasn't going to be on the list, was I?"

She never had a chance. A distant corner of Clarke's brain wants to talk about genetic disorders and Harper's father and preserving the best chances of healthy offspring.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says instead. 

"Fuck," Harper says, taking a step back. Something breaks, and Clarke suddenly realizes that most of the delinquents - the surviving ones, anyway - aren't actually her friends. She earned their respect and loyalty by teaching them she would do whatever it took to save their lives, until she didn't. Without that responsibility, Clarke has nothing.

"If it makes a difference," Clarke says hesitantly, "Dante said Bellamy and I can't be on that list either."

Now Harper looks at her. 

"Fuck," she says again, blinking rapidly. "Well. Do you want to get drunk?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I really do."

The Arkadian camp settles into something like the calm before the storm, everyone holding their breath through another day that they aren't dead yet.

Dante is right about one thing. He haunts Clarke everywhere she goes, his memory immune to the radiation that keeps his real self out of her sight. _What’s stopping you from killing all my people?_ She makes lists and argues with walls. _What’s stopping you, Clarke? What’s stopping you?_

There are too many reasons why the Sky People don’t deserve to live. They floated her father. They’ve floated a lot of fathers over the years. They lied. They sent a hundred children to the ground to die. She weighs their sins with the bodies in the mine carts beneath Mount Weather and the smell of fear in the room where the cages were kept and talks herself in circles.

She wants it to be black and white. It would be okay if they weren’t the good guys, if Clarke could definitely say that _someone_ is, but there are no good guys, just deaths piling up on both sides. It comes down to this: every Mountain Men who lives into the apocalypse means a Sky Person who doesn’t.

_What’s stopping you, Clarke?_ Harper slides her another drink and it’s easier to chug that than to wonder who should die for whose sake.

The calm bursts three days later just after the start of the second shift, as the first round of Arkadians helping to prepare Mount Weather for an extra 100 inhabitants exits the bunker and the evening round finishes their quarantine. They cycle through the bunker on 24 hour shifts, staying long enough that the work they can get done is worth the hours of decontamination and short that - Clarke suspects - Dante thinks they won't get too comfortable.

But he was right to expect the worst from the Sky People. By the time reaches the surface that the second shift has mounted a coup inside the bunker, there's little that they can do.

Clarke, specifically, is drunk when she finds out.

She and Harper have been drunk for most of the past three days. In normal circumstances it might start to count as alcoholism, but because they are young and beautiful and the world is coming to an end, Clarke thinks it doesn't matter much. Bellamy has to tell her three times before the words sink in and then she's stumbling to her feet.

"I have to - " someone is saying, over and over again, and Clarke wants them to shut up or finish the sentence already. It takes her a moment to realize it's her voice, because it doesn't feel like her throat belongs to her right now.

"You're too drunk to deal with this," Bellamy tells her irritably, and the disappointment that flashes across his face is too much to bare, so Clarke breaks into the medbay, drinks three cups of water, and gives herself an adrenaline injection.

It's a terrible idea. She would not recommend it to anyone, but it gets her moving and shifts the blurred, morphing edges of her drunken haze into a clarity so sharp she is worried she's going to cut herself on the sharp shadows of the overhead sun. She gets a gun by threatening to blacklist the guard watching the munitions from the list of survivors who will be granted a place in Mount Weather, and when Bellamy steps into the lift that will take him into quarantine, she's there too, slipping through too quickly for him to stop her. Her hands won't stop jittering. She's about as likely to shoot a friend as she is a foe, and that would be dangerous enough if the line weren't already blurry. The Arkadians are her people, even the stupid idiots who have decided to try to start a coup that she didn't authorize, but that doesn't mean they're friends. Maya is, technically, a foe, like every person in Mount Weather whose heartbeat means another spot that Clarke's people can't fill, but the thought that she or someone else innocent might be caught by the violence makes Clarke's heart pound dangerously in her chest as they pass through a hasty decontamination and into the bunker.

Maybe it's not just guilt. That adrenaline shot probably isn't doing her cardiac output any favours.

They find Kara dead on the ground two levels in, which isn't such a surprise, in hindsight. Clarke should have paid more attention after her outburst in the Council room, but instead she was thinking about what it would take to get Bellamy to kiss her.

There are thirteen Mount Weather casualties. Five Arkadians. No survivors to question, no idea if there are allies left above ground. Dante's face is such a deep purple, when they are finally led to him, that Clarke sort of has the urge to sit him down and start a medical examination. But she'd have to put her gun down to do that properly, and right now she's relating to the way Bellamy cuddles his gun like a safety blanket more than usual.

"Of course you're here," Dante says irritably when he sees them.

"Please believe me," Clarke says, reaching forward and being shoved back by Dante's guards. Bellamy is at her side in a split second, reassuring himself that she's steady on her feet before menacing the guards. "Bellamy, no - Dante listen, this attack, this wasn't us. I would never sanction this, believe me, it was a small group of dissenters - "

"That doesn't matter to the families of the thirteen people dead today," Dante says. "I have half a mind to never let any of you step foot inside ever again."

"You need us as much as we need you," Bellamy reminds him, and Dante slams his hands down on his desk so hard that he breaks a finger. Clarke sees him wince at the impact, sees the unnatural angle of the bend before he holds both bands behind his back and gathers his calm about him like a shroud.

"I know," Dante says, his voice measured and furious. "I've been reminding myself of that every day that your people keep their boots on the throats of my people."

"You don't get to play the victim card now," Bellamy snarls. "I was hung by my ankles and bled for your convenience. Everything you've gotten, you deserved."

Clarke clutches at Bellamy, afraid he's going to murder Dante right there, afraid they're both going to die right here without seeing the sky again, afraid they won't and she'll have to pick up the pieces.

"Can everyone shut up for a fucking second?"

Dante squints at her.

"Are you drunk, Clarke?" he asks incredulously.

"No," Clarke says, at the same time that Bellamy says "Yes."

Dante's lips are barely there anymore. Just two flat, pale lines.

"You're not taking your impending death very well, are you?"

"It doesn't matter," Clarke says. "As long as my people make it."

Dante closes his eyes and is silent for a long, long moment. _I bear it,_ he says in her memory. _So they don't have to._

"Get out," he says. "Take your dead and get out. You can have your 100 spaces in this bunker as long as there is no more violence. If this happens again, you will lose a spot for every one of my citizens who dies."

"We'll pass on the message," Bellamy says roughly, and then he grabs Clarke's shoulder and hauls her out. The adrenaline shot is fading fast and in its wake there is only a terrible headache, like the worst hangover she's ever had.

They spot Jasper on their way out. He's wearing unfamiliar clothes and walking away down a branching hallway, but Clarke recognizes the lanky shoulders and the way his hair sticks out. He used to walk through the halls of Mount Weather like he was afraid he'd hit his head on the ceiling after weeks spent with an open sky overhead but now it looks like he's settled into his new home.

"Jasper!" Clarke calls out, relief tugging upwards at the corners of her mouth. Jasper doesn't smile when he turns around. He's startled for a second, and angry by the time he's moving towards them. "I'm glad you're okay," Clarke says uncertainly. "Is Maya - "

"She is not the only person in this bunker whose safety matters!" Jasper snaps at them. "Control your goddamn people!"

_Your_ people. As though he doesn't belong with them anymore. Clarke knows he is angry at them for how close they came to irradiating Mount Weather, but he's avoided her for most of the past months, and she didn't know how deep that fury ran until now. While she's blinking back startled tears, Bellamy grabs Jasper's arm and yanks the sleeve down. On his arm is a neat row of tiny white cotton balls with strips of medical tape holding them down.

"How much blood do they take a week for rent?" Bellamy asks, his voice hard and bitter. "They're not your friends."

Jasper snatches his arm away and tugs the sleeve down hastily, hiding the tiny graveyard of injection sites.

"Fuck you," he says, voice shaking, and then he's gone, his shoulders hunched up to his ears as he marches down the hall.

Sunset comes earlier and earlier in the coming days as the night gains territory. One evening Clarke and Monty are up on the ridge over Mount Weather and the sight of the world stretched out beneath them, gleaming orange-gold in the magic hour, knocks her momentarily breathless. This will all be destroyed in a few weeks.

This has all been destroyed before, and it came back again.

"Are you coming?" Monty asks, jerking her out of her thoughts.

Officially, they are out on patrol. Unofficially, Clarke is here because Bellamy wanted her to sober up, Monroe has wandered off to scout ahead, Miller is walking a dozen steps behind them with the big gun, and Monty is collecting pine cones.

She's not sure by what criteria he's picking them. Some go into his pockets immediately, some are dropped back onto the ground as soon as some insect tries to scurry to safety. Sometimes he'll walk for several minutes with a few in his hands, turning them over and over until some are discarded and some are placed gently in his pocket. Clarke has been silent for most of their walk but she realizes it has been a while since she and Monty really talked. This is as good an opportunity as any.

"I saw Jasper," Clarke says, and Monty stiffens. 

"Inside,” she clarifies quickly, and he looks only slightly less distressed. However much Jasper’s absence has hurt Clarke, it’s hurt Monty more. He, like Harper, has little interest in going back to the place that cut them to the bone and kept cutting. “He’s going to live,” Clarke says.

“Good. Someone should,” Monty says simply.

“You’re on the Council’s shortlist too,” Clarke says. “For Mount Weather. I just - I thought you should know.”

Monty’s hand uncurls from a tight fist. A slightly crumpled pine cone sits in his palms. There are red crescent-shaped indents in his skin where he was holding it too tightly.

“Do you ever think about how trees grow when there’s already a forest in the way?” Monty asks.

“No? Should I?”

“If the canopy is too thick, not enough sunlight penetrates to the forest floor for saplings to grow,” Monty says. “Can you imagine? Being a tree, and dropping seeds for years and years and years, and hardly any of them even get a chance to sprout.”

“Is this about the dropship?” Clarke asks, helplessly trying to follow his train of thought.

“No,” Monty says. He thinks. “Yes. And no.” He gives her a pine cone. “So some plants develop this strategy. They lock up the seeds. Nothing less than a forest fire can open them up. An entire forest burns to the ground, and there’s no more canopy to block out the sun. For a while there’s just ash, and suddenly, saplings again.”

“That seems overly complicated,” Clarke says. “And sad. I don’t want the whole forest to burn down in the first place.”

“But it happens,” Monty says.

“Are you saying it’ll be okay again, after the apocalypse?”

“Maybe,” Monty says, not looking at her. The cliff ahead of them crumbles into loose pebbles. They don’t speak for a while as they hike well into the surrounding trees to reach the stable ground on the other side of that landslide waiting to happen.

Now that Monty’s started talking about trees Clarke pays more attention to the ones around her. At the edge of the forest the trunks are thinner and paler than the ones deeper into the thicket. As they walk between them the sun comes into her eyes in flashes, alternatively golden and shadowed. It’ll be dark when they return to Arkadia. She recognizes birch, she thinks, eyeing the peeling bark.

She looks at them and sees paper and kindling. Monty looks at them and sees a revolution holding its breath.

Clarke keeps thinking about seeds that only sprout after fire. It doesn’t seem right to require so much death to start living. The memory of metal rattling and a seatbelt digging into her abdomen makes her shiver. Two dead on impact, and a crowd of children clamoring at the door. It was the first time she’d ever met eyes with Bellamy Blake, and Clarke thinks the girl her mother sent down died on the spot. He was her fire, and she was the third casualty of the original hundred, not Wells.

The person she’s been since he opened the dropship door is not the person she would have been had she kept living on the Ark, safe and oxygenated and knowing nothing of forests or fire.

When she was throwing back moonshine with Harper nothing made sense, and nothing had to. When the headache fades and clarity settles in with practiced resignation, a thought that’s been tickling distantly at Clarke’s mind for a while finally surfaces coherently.

She finds Bellamy sorting ammunition on a stool at the edge of Arkadia. The semicircle of Mount Weather’s locked vault door sits behind him, half-halo, half-mouth. It makes Clarke uneasy to see it again, a shame then, that it is visible from most of Arkadia. She always thinks of being trapped on the outside with the footsteps of <strike>her</strike> Lexa’s army fading away, feeling small and insignificant, a virus with no way in. Clarke parks herself at Bellamy’s side, her head turned so she doesn’t have to see that stupid door, and Bellamy cranes his neck to look up at her.

“I expected you to say something about Octavia by now,” Clarke says as a greeting. His hand stills momentarily on the belt of bullets he’s currently checking. Silence. Then he begins again, turning each bullet over to check its casing for bulges and stains where the metal is splitting apart and leaking gunpowder. 97 years is a long time for bullets to be sitting, even stored in barrels of oil in undisturbed bunkers, so every few centimeters he spins a pair of pliers around in his deft fingers and eases a bullet out, dropping it into the bucket at his feet like a medieval dentist might discard pulled teeth.

“Are you looking for something?” Bellamy asks mildly. There’s no one else near enough to overhear them, not with how low and quiet they’re speaking. Thunder rumbles overhead.

“You can’t seriously expect me to believe that Bellamy fucking Blake doesn’t have some kind of plan in mind to keep his sister alive through the apocalypse,” Clarke says. Honestly, she’s angry she didn’t wonder sooner. She’s been - she’s been distant. Locked in her own fury and helplessness.

“Word got out, Princess,” Bellamy says. “Jaha says there’s another bunker under Polis. There’s a group of Grounders moving into the Alpha crash site, another talking about sailing into the middle of the ocean for a few years until it passes. There’s a lot of ways for someone to try to survive, if they want.”

“Those are all wishful thinking,” Clarke scoffs. Distantly, she hears the sound of rain on leaves. A second later, her skin stings.

Someone across the camp starts to scream, and only heartbeats later, as more raindrops fall, other voices follow.

“Black rain!” someone yells.

“Get inside! Everyone get to shelter!”

Bellamy leaps to his feet instantly and pulls Clarke’s head down to her chin, hiding her face from the drops that are falling quicker now, each one leaving the exposed skin of her arms red and itching.

They’re too far from any buildings. They'll never make it in time.

“The door,” Clarke gasps, and they sprint for the semi-circle entrance to Mount Weather as far as they can. The vault will be as locked as it always is, but the overhang that juts out might just provide enough shelter, if the wind doesn’t blow the raindrops in the wrong direction.

A few meters away from safety, thunder rumbles again, closer, and the rain starts to come down faster. Clarke trips on a rock hidden under dead leaves knocked loose by autumn’s chill and sprawls out on the ground, the impact knocking all the air out of her lungs. When the acid rain touches her skin she can’t help but whimper and curl in on herself, shocked by how much it hurts.

_“I am not letting you die!”_

She’s only down for seconds before hands haul her upright roughly. When her knees buckle under her weight, Bellamy picks her up, tucking her body against his and hurrying them the last few steps to shelter.

They press their bodies as close to the unforgiving metal door as possible, willing it to be enough, willing the winds to stay true. Bellamy lifts the hem of his shirt up and tries to wipe the water off her arms. When Clarke shrieks in pain at his touch against her reddened skin and wriggles away, he pins her against the door and gives her no choice. He puts his back to the rain and ducks his head low, forehead pressed to hers, trying to make them small.

The sting doesn’t go away, but it doesn’t get any worse. After a few minutes, Clarke slips her throbbing hands under Bellamy’s jacket and around his waist, holding him close.

“What's the point? We’re going to die anyway,” Clarke says desperately.

“We’re not,” Bellamy says. “I won’t let you. Especially not like this. We’ll live, Clarke, and we’ll take as many with us as we can.”

“I’m so tired, Bellamy,” she sobs into the collar of his shirt. “It was so hard to keep everyone alive, and it didn’t even matter anyway.”

“It did,” he says into her hair. “It does.”

_What's stopping you from killing all my people?_ Dante asks in her memory.

_This_, Clarke thinks desperately. The pain and conviction in Bellamy's eyes, then and now, is the only thing that kept Mount Weather safe from her.

She’d been ready to pull the lever, and Bellamy put his hand on hers. He would have pulled it with her, and it would have shattered them apart. In a different universe, a crueler one, they did pull it. In this one, Dante took the gun and shot his son, and Clarke let out a sigh of relief that has been rattling around in her ribcage ever since. She's afraid of the people they almost became. She's afraid there's still time for them to become those people.

Bellamy strokes her hair as she cries through the pitter-patter of black rain.

“I’ll take care of it,” he whispers. “Shh. You don’t have to worry about a thing, all right? Shh. Shh.”

They start sleeping together after the black rain. Sometimes this means his hand around her throat and her nails digging into his shoulders. Sometimes this means lying fully clothed above the blankets, their fingertips brushing for a brief stretch of dreaming.

“Dante is right,” Clarke says to the ceiling one night. There are crickets singing outside, but not for long.

Bellamy is silent. The slow pace of his breath does not change at all.

“We could take the bunker,” Clarke whispers. It feels traitorous to even think the words, let alone speak them into a world where too many people are looking to her for the answers. She lays stiffly in the bed, her fingers itching for a weapon, convinced in her half-asleep state that someone will kick down the door and demand she lead a massacre any second now.

Eventually, when no one does, she falls asleep.

Clarke starts to draw, feverishly, while Bellamy goes and does whatever it is that he’s doing during the day. Kane and her mother come by one day to ask her thoughts on drawing a lottery for the lucky 100 who will get to live on in Mount Weather. Clarke throws a list in their faces and slams the door. A memorial goes up on the walls of Bellamy’s cabin. Wells. Charlotte. Finn. Lexa. Her father. Others, as many faces as she can remember, some of them mere gesture drawings, a suggestion of memory.

She does not draw Bellamy, or Monty, or Raven or Harper or the others. In her dreams there is still a way out for them that doesn't involve her pulling the lever she sees every time she closes her eyes.

Acid rains falls, thicker and more frequently each time. Arkadians vanish into the woods and do not return. Abby doubles the patrols to keep out Grounders who might get bright ideas. Clarke wanted to go back up to the ridge over Mount Weather where she and Monty saw that sunset, watch it one last time before she dies, but no one will let her past Arkadia’s perimeter, not with any excuse.

By the time Clarke’s sketched her own face, Bellamy comes for her. There’s a radiation suit in his arms.

“I’m going for a few days,” he says. “Helping Raven with something. I… I want you with me.”

Every question on the tip of her tongue flies right out of her mind with that last phrase. _I want you with me._ It makes her blood sing in her veins. She sets the radiation suit aside and kisses him for a very long time, until fists pound on the door and a voice she recognizes as Monty’s asks if they’re ready to go.

“Take the drawings,” Bellamy says softly, so she tucks them against her chest, inside the suit. There are half a dozen barrels in the back of the rover they’ve negotiated out of Mount Weather somehow. When Bellamy pushes his foot against the acceleration the engine whines and the rover is sluggish with their weight. Clarke wonders, but Harper leans her head against her shoulder to settle in for the drive and that feels more important. She sleeps through some of it.

She wakes when they reach the edge of the water, and the silhouette of a boat parts the fog that hangs just above the surface. The water is glassy and black and bottomless. Clarke stares at the ripples as the others call out to the boat, feeling oddly like it is looking back at her, like she is known. The silence after the boat’s engine is cut makes her ears ring.

She recognizes Murphy with a start. Murphy, who vanished after the chaos and confusion of the battle against ALIE. The girl who splashes into the shallows after him is small, lithe, and clever, if the look in her eyes is anything to go by. The others call her Emori. When they start loading the barrels from the back of the rover into the boat, Clarke shoves her weight with the rest of them.

“What is this?” Clarke asks Harper as the engine rumbles back up again and an acrid smell like burning plastic fills her nose and drifts in their wake, a comet trail across the water as they leave the shore behind for more of that dark, glassy unknown.

Harper smiles and holds her hand.

“It’s a way for us to live.” More than that, Clarke realizes later. It's a way to live that comes without the price of someone's death.

The view from the island isn't as good as Mount Weather's ridge, but Clarke finds a rock that juts out over the water along the beach and sits until her legs go numb and the sky turns orange, like fire. Bellamy finds her just as she's drumming her fists against her thigh, trying to encourage some circulation. Clarke shifts ever so slightly on her rock, a non-verbal invitation for him to sit.

His gaze lingers on the radio at her feet. She smashed it against a corner of the rock and the casing is bent inwards on one side and falling apart at a corner. There are small pieces of circuitry and God knows what trailing out from it, like a sacrificial circle around her.

"They irradiated Mount Weather," Clarke says hoarsely. He closes his eyes and rocks back with the blow. Quiet, for a moment.

"I'm not surprised," he says eventually, and the worst is that Clarke is not either. The seeds of it were already planted from the first deal they struck with Dante and the first meeting of the Council to discuss it. The Ark survived for so long by taking and taking and taking.

"Did you know they would?" Clarke hates the note of accusation that creeps into her voice despite her best efforts, but - she didn't know about the island, either.

"I don't know," Bellamy says, which has a different meaning than _I didn't know_. He kicks at a nearby pebble with his foot. An insect in the shrubbery near them stops singing, and starts again, suspiciously this time. When Bellamy speaks again it is slowly and carefully, like he is picking a trail in the dark and doesn't know what the next word is until he says it. "I knew if we stayed... they'd make you do it. I couldn't let that happen."

Clarke takes in a deep, rattling breath. He's right. If they had stayed they would have been forced to make that choice. To decide if ending all those lives was worth continuing theirs. And no matter what they used to say, that choice _would_ have defined them. The only way to win was to create a third option.

"I think that might be the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me," she says, choked.

"Are you okay?"

Intellectually she understands what their people have done. Over 300 people in Mount Weather survived her crusade to free the delinquents, only to die after all. Emotionally, Clarke is afraid the extent of the death hasn't really sunk in. The bones that crunched under her feet after the ring of fire didn't quite feel real either. At both the edge and end of the world, all that death feels far away, dream-like. Like their time on Earth was only a nightmare, and traveling back to the Ark is waking up.

She keeps thinking the colour of Maya's blood after Clarke held a shard of glass to her throat, and then imagining that colour everywhere, and then feeling dizzy.

"I feel like a terrible person for being relieved my mother won't die after all," Clarke says at last, because she feels like she has to say something, and it's the one thing she's certain of right now. She looks at Bellamy and finds the edges of his face glowing gold in the fading sunlight. Every time she thinks she's gotten used to how beautiful he is, he takes her breath away again. The hollow grief in his eyes makes her reach out, wanting to draw the pain out and into herself. Their hands tangle together. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," Bellamy says again. He's looking at the sunset instead of her, which is fine, because it's the last sunset they'll see for a while.

"Has Monty told you about the pine cones yet?" Clarke asks. When Bellamy just frowns in confusion, no trace of recognition in his eyes, she smiles bashfully. "He can explain it better than I can. But... we're saplings, Bellamy. We'll grow again after this."

She wants to tell him he's her forest fire but it's not the right time, so she just stands up and holds tightly to his hand. She says goodbye to the last sunset she might ever see and turns away. Their shadows stretch out far ahead of them as they walk back to the lab, the sun at their backs.

By the time Becca's rocket takes off it's only a deep red low on the horizon, the lingering memory of daylight. They chase the sunset through the boundary of atmosphere and back into space. The sunlight coming through the porthole illuminates Emori's stunned and delighted face. Next to her, Octavia has her eyes screwed shut.

Raven docks them to the Ark manually, and then they're home. For Clarke it is the first time in a year and a half that she sees a part of the Ark that was not her cell in the Skybox. She touches the metal floor as the others scramble to install the first oxygenator, and cries tears of relief.

The day the algae farms start to bloom is the day the world begins to end. Again. They gather in Geo-Sci to watch it, all of them, and there are enough delinquents packed into the remnants of the Ark to make it a little crowded. The room quickly grows warm, and with a few taps at the environmental controls Raven seals off some of the unused rooms and diverts extra air circulation to their section. No one wants to be alone right now, and if the feeling in Clarke's gut is accurate, they'll be standing at the windows for a while.

"I found Jaha's baton," Octavia says, the first words anyone's been able to speak since it began. Miller gets out cups and they start to pour out tiny tastes of the coveted bottle, stretching its finite contents out as far as they'll go.

"To the survivors," Bellamy says dully, raising his cup. Down below, the Sky People must be settling in Mount Weather, unpacking in the rooms of dead strangers, mourning the friends left on the surface. The last news that came from Polis before Clarke broke the radio was that the twelve clans were fighting over the bunker Jaha found, and Clarke wonders if they paused long enough to notice they'd run out of time. If they'd put down the swords long enough to decide at least some of them got to go on.

"To the survivors," Clarke echoes, raising her cup. She meets Monty's eyes across the room, and raises it again for him. "To pine cones," she says, and sees him smile faintly.

Clarke throws her shot back and watches fires bloom on the surface of the planet, a failing nuclear reactor at the center of each one. From up here they look like flowers with glowing orange petals unfurling, or bruises. From up here the violence is not so real. She leans into Bellamy's side, lets him wrap a warm and heavy arm around her shoulders. _My forest fire_, she thinks, filled with a quiet sort of love as he drops a kiss to her scalp. _You'll lead us into tomorrow._

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night.
> 
> If it wasn't obvious enough, the dichotomy was condemning either Mount Weather or Sky People to die. Canon really likes us or them conflicts. 🙄
> 
> Please feel free to check out other submissions for this challenge. Voting will be open in a few days, and you can read more details [here](https://chopped100challenge.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> The _if not examined too closely, the compromise passes for peace._ line is a reference to a famous Terry Pratchett quote on justice. There are other references I want to credit that would spoil my anonymity, so I'll add them in after the round is complete and everyone's names have been revealed. :)


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